Fish Swim in the Lake

Part 6.4 | You like it? It's yours

Colin picked up a goosenecked blue bottle from the bristling glass spires on Vas's wet bar. He turned it in his hands. His mouth opened and closed. He poured himself a drink of something pale amber and drank it. His voice was small and compressed when he eventually asked, tentatively, "how could you sell us out?"

"How could we keep on pretending we weren't mass murderers?"

alphaDana stiffened with one foot in her disposable jumpsuit. Colin and Vas seemed entirely unaware of her. She eased the paper up and over her shoulders and pushed in her breasts. She was recording.

"We didn't know," Colin said, reedy and tired. Words he'd said so many times before that they were creased with use. "Now we're developing alternatives. We've cut dependence on them to a third what it was at the millennium. A third! And that's with new broke countries coming online all the time! All in less than..." he pointed to alphaDana, "her lifespan."

"Does that justify the dead thing you've stuck on Sparks Street to -- to tell the tourists where to go! And you planned to dress it up to make it look alive to scare us Up There, to keep us fighting them and keep us delivering the goods!"

"We've got to have it," Colin said. "The economy can't stand it. It's not our fault. We didn't know they were alive. We thought we were capturing that super advanced alien tech, you know, the stuff that was supposed to be out there. We didn't know that it was them!"

"Even after you knew they were alive you kept on using them. You talk about reducing dependence and developing alternatives but you never say what to -- to mass murder and slavery."

"So what do you want to do? You want to go on the net and tell everybody that those big routers that make all this possible are actually slaves -- that everybody that ever used the net is a -- a -- a profiteer? A killer? There'd be riots! Can you justify doing that to your own kind?"

Vas raised a gravity fissured hand. "Can I call you my own kind when I can't even walk on your planet?"

"You're still carbon," Colin said. "You can't pretend you're silicon like them."

Vas spun angrily. In lunar gravity it would have been a quick, vicious movement; dulled and supported as he was by drugs he floated rich and slow. He extended a forefinger at alphaDana and said, "what about her, Colin? What's she made of?"

Posted by gtaylor at May 16, 2002 09:43 AM